Latest post of the previous page:
true, but as I was addressing a humanist forum I thought I should use the word.Emma Woolgatherer wrote: the Golden Rule is one of those ideas that crops up all over the place. It doesn't belong to humanists any more than it belongs to Christians or Confucians. And I'm not aware that there's a uniquely humanist formulation of it.)
largely true, which reflects, as I said in the trolley thread, that maybe one just does not often get the opportunity to decide about being moral and in what way. And as you say (and I believe that you are naturally a moral person) we get used to doing sort of the right thing. But sometimes one can get away with being dishonest or selfish or nasty - so I would think that choosing to apply the GR (or at least to try doing this) does come into play - that's why I asked all the questions.Emma Woolgatherer wrote: You can be quite selfish, I think, and still adopt the Golden Rule of Thumb in order to increase your chances of surviving and living comfortably and peacefully (if that's what you want). It could be as much a matter of prudence as morality.
well, this is what I have come to be arguing in our previous exchanges, and it is necessary for my belief that at least some moral statements can be valid or true - they cannot be objective as there is no object for them to relate to or be verified by.Emma Woolgatherer wrote: I don't think "objective" means the same as "valid", although I suppose there's a slight overlap in the dictionary definitions.
not sure what you mean - obviously your and everyone else's statements, moral or not, are often not logical, and what has legal force got to do with this?Emma Woolgatherer wrote: But I could say also that my own moral judgements are not necessarily valid, either, in that they are not all well grounded in logic and they don't all have legal force.
well, this the crux of it. Let's stop using the word "objective" as we seem to agree that it does not mean, or be necessary for, truth or validity in moral statements. Yes, you can't escape the position that you (and I) are both inside the system (of making judgments about things and people) and simultaneously trying to be outside, in the meta-ethical sense of making judgments about judgments and systems. This is where you and I differ, as I think we can say with some certainty that statements like "Causing unnecessary pain is wrong" are in their own way simply true. Of course I can't prove this, but I would challenge anyone to argue the opposite. This is the line I am taking below over Thundril's example of the nazi and yours over the incest taboo (unfortunately - in a sense! - there is noone on TH who holds these views, or defends slavery, my other example, so I will have to think for them).Emma Woolgatherer wrote:I think that some moral statements are of greater value than others, but then I would, wouldn't I, because I'm the judge of that value. I don't think that some moral statements are objectively of greater value than others. But where there is a high level of intersubjective agreement, as there is in so many cases, it is possible to talk as if they were [---][/---] or perhaps impossible not to talk as if they were.
Take the nazi first. I assume that the case for nazism in fact relies on a large number of empirically falsifiable claims about eg the natural superiority of the white Aryan race (fitness to rule), the paradoxical claim that it is threatened by races which are inferior in some way, that mongrelisation is weakening the race, that race and nation are "objective", and so on; these arguments would need disentangling, but in principle I think the false factual claims could be stripped away. Would any genuinely deep ethical difference remain between the nazi and the liberal? Who knows, but it is for the relativist to prove that such a difference remains. If anything (and I get the impression that this applies to Thundril's nazi), the difference might simply be that the nazi is essentially amoral, egoistic and openly unethical, rather than holding a different ethic from the liberal: he says in effect, I can do as I please, why shouldn't I, and if I care about anyone if is about my nearest and dearest - at the expense of justice, equality, human rights and all the other things that the liberal holds dear. The nazi might of course talk about Nietzsche and his superman philosophy, but without the systematic and disprovable racism this could never constitute any justification for nazism. Please note that I am not claiming that there are no differences between the ethical views of individuals or societies (and of course in the sincerity, consistency and commitment with which they hold these views), but I am claiming that it is unproven how important these are when viewed apart from the confusion of assumptions and factual claims. The taboo (on incest) champion would I imagine be even more easily be challenged if one had the opportunity to show that the disasters which he claimed would result from breaking taboos just did not occur; since incest can in fact have undesirable genetic effects, however, this disproof is unlikely to happen, though maybe eventually a test case will come up in which barren and related people might wish to marry; I imagine that adult siblings do often have sex and the incest law appears not to be used much.
So that is one strand of my argument: that I believe actually challenging unenlightened (I know that's a loaded word) people could separate out the differences between moral and empirical. The other is that I think that we do make moral progress (very much a meta-ethical view), simply because we can look back on the societies of the past and see how their deeply held moral systems depended on their society's needs (for instance, 17C slave-based societies had to draw on the Bible to justify their practices, and Aristotle defined slaves as human tools). As Wilson says, our empathy has widened considerably to include all men and women, and we are starting to include other sentient beings. With all our faults, we are wealthy enough not to need to lie or enslave, and knowledgeable enough to make these judgments; the position is simply asymmetric (we do know more than they did) and thus there is no ground for relativism. Of course, we are always changing, and many things which we may now think morally OK (or at least tolerate) may be rejected in the future (I am thinking about huge disparities of wealth between nations and individuals and about our treatment of animals, but there could be other future attitude changes about which I have no inkling). But remember that I am not holding up all our current society's moral attitudes as correct, only a few basic ones - like the one I mentioned, or the judgment that one should try to keep one's word unless there is a good reason not to.
I don't think that either of you (Emma and Thundril), or maybe anyone else who has contributed to this thread (eg Wilson), is in fact a moral relativist in the sense of claiming that one society's norms are just as good as another, but just in case, I would like to mention the neat demolition of ethical relativism in Peter Cave's book.
but surely this would be true of all of us? Are these your own definitions or are they from a source? You've mentioned Mackie, but I have not read his book, only a few writeupsEmma wrote:As for whether I'm a moral relativist, well, this is where the jargon comes in again. I'm a descriptive relativist, in that I recognise that people have different ideas aboutwhat is the morally right course of action in a particular circumstance.
I am not sure that is what meta-ethical relativists say, but again I don't know where you have got this fromEmma wrote:I'm not a meta-ethical relativist, in that I don't reject objective moral values just to replace them with culturally specific ones.
well yes, that is what I am trying to do, although, to repeat, it would be more convincing if there was a real someone with radically different views to challenge (of course, maybe if I did debate with a nazi, he would win and I would end up a nazi!). It is the normative relativist, who says we SHOULD accept any old crap (like stoning people for adultery), for the sake of multiculturalism, who is the target for Cave (since it obviously is itself making a moral judgment). I would say that you were a subjectivist rather than a relativist (for what it's worth).Emma wrote:Moral values vary within cultures as well as between them. And I am not a normative relativist, in that I don't believe we should always accept the behaviour of others when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards. People will inevitably try to act on the basis of their own (genuinely held) moral values, and try to persuade others to act on the same moral values.
not sure this is true, or at least it is no more true for moral than for aesthetic value-statements, as you have previously reminded me. But these hypothetical imperatives you mention are not moral statements at all, are they? They just say that if some particular thing is to be achieved, then some other particular thing "should" be performed.Emma wrote:Er ... yes, I ... I think so. But talking about this is a bit tricky, because our language is geared up to the idea that there are objective moral values, and it's very hard to step away from thatanimist wrote:If so, is this compatible with the Golden Rule and with any other moral judgments that you make?
To end for now (yes, I think I should!), I do think it is a bit funny of humanists in general to claim the Golden Rule as their ethical base yet not want to actively defend its validity or value!